Hey guys. I've kept the specs of my media centre down so it runs quietly (no serious gaming, 1080p video plays fine) but I'd like to play games on my TV. Would it be possible to screencast from my gaming PC on Windows to my HTPC on Linux, giving the impression of Linux gaming?

I'm sure it would be... but should I expect a bit of lag?

I assume you mean to pipe or route the images to a linux system on your TV? That would be some form of remote desktop. The NX type may be the fastest.

I don't get the connection between windows and linux gaming. What do you mean?

Hi,

I don't think that any D3D from windows is transferred to remote display like with VNC or RDP.
So I guess that it is not possible whatever you want to do, except if you connect your game computer's video output (HDMI ) to the TV.

Yes, I meant using my Linux box as a middleman to save me the effort of moving my Windows machine to the TV. Thanks for the help guys. I'll give a few methods a try

well, It was asked before and using google ("windows rdp d3d") I found
- this
- this
and
- this
which I think are relative to your needs, but not satisfactory.
This one is explaining how is possible, but it comes so sloooow it is not usable.

I can't believe it wouldn't be more viable. I understand remote desktop would be unusably slow, but it'd only be streaming video, in effect. I don't want to send input to Linux to be passed on to Windows, I want to directly control Windows (and the game) but view the output on a Linux machine. With it being over a local connection it just seems so possible.

Again, thanks for the helps/links

You have to understand some simple things. No, you would not be streaming video. The video-card on the Windows machine calculates the output and puts it into the video-RAM, where it is read by the output chip and send to the display. Let's assume that you play in 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution in 32 bit color-depth and 60Hz. That means with have a necessary bandwith of 1920*1080*32*60 bits per second = 3981312000 bits/sec or about 4GBit/second. Even in 720p (1280x720) you would need about 1.8Gbit/second. So you would need some serious compression to come along, but only if you have 1GBit LAN at home.
But there is something completely different that would totally suck the fun out of gaming: Lag. Since the video output from the Windows would have been read out from the video memory, compressed, send over the network to the Linux machine, decompressed, sent to the video-memory and then send to the display you would have serious time differences between input and visible reaction on the screen. This would be anything but fun.

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Remote desktops tend to use some cheats to reduce bandwidth. Basically compression of one or more ways is used. As stated you can't easily take a frame by frame and send it.

Unless someone knows of a better or faster way to transmit a desktop then I'd still say use one of the NX type remotes. I have not seen a test between Remmina and a NX system.

Windows RDP is a pretty good system to use and linux has clients.

Why not just get the video output from the gaming box directly to the TV? If it's less than about 25 ft you can use DVI directly. Otherwise you'll want to use a DVI repeater/booster or a VGA-over-CAT5 solution. Either of which is going to give you much, much better results than any RDP/NX setup. I use RDP all the time from a windows host to a Linux client, in fact I'm typing this message through it right now. Day to day usability on a gigabit LAN is perfectly acceptable, but as soon as you try to stream full screen video the framerate drops well into the single digits, it just can't handle that kind of bandwidth.

Thanks for the information guys, especially TobiSGD. That was an informative post. It's about ten feet away, so I think the solution is to buy a longer HDMI cable.

Much appreciated